Having worked professionally as both a standup comedian and a crime novelist, my own theory is that writing crime fiction and performing comedy have far more in common than might first appear. While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.
Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, attention has got to be grabbed
Links of the week June 15 2015 (25)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
22 June 2015
A strong opening is, of course, crucial. That first gag has got to be a cracker if the crowd is to trust you and relax into your material. Ditto the readers of your book. Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of Fifty Shades of Whatever. The same applies to the climax of your act/novel. Whether your loose ends are to be tied up or left dangling, whether you leave the audience on a shaggy dog story or a song, a bang is always preferable to a whimper.
Last week FutureBook asked, how big is the self-publishing market? The simple answer is that only Amazon knows. The more complex answer is that it is big enough - and growing.
On the Passive Guy website thriller writer Lee Child gave one of the most telling of comments in response to Shatzkin's blog. "Whichever numbers you choose to believe, e-reading gets a minority of eyeball time in a couple of major markets, and less than that in a handful of others. It's a small fishbowl. Even with the spectacular 70% return, it's a losing proposition for the one-percenters. So the disruptors have hard work ahead - they need to drag e-reading acceptance into an overwhelming global majority, without the one-percenters to help. If they manage it, then we'll jump ship, probably."
"I was a common college student in 2002," she told Xu. "[One day] I made up a wuxia (martial arts) story in my mind, but none of my classmates wanted to hear it, so I decided to write it down on the internet. A very simple intention, but soon, I was surprised that so many people liked my work. About four months later, a publisher left a message on my blog and asked if I wanted to publish my work."
To date she has published 25 books.
At the very top of the tier are the 20-30 web writers known as platinum authors or zhigaoshen (the Supreme God) class of writers. The 2014 Chinese web-writers list ranks Tangjiasanshao first, with earnings of 50 million yuan (around $8.06 million) per year from royalties, while second and third on the list both raked in more than 25 million yuan ($4.03 million) each. Of course, seeing the money that can be made, piracy and plagiarism has become a danger for web-authors. "Some readers pay to read the works but then share them with other internet users for free. Some writers "imitate" the plot in ordinary writers' works or mix different novel elements together into their own works."
It looks like the software industry is eating publishing for breakfast. To survive, every publisher must find its path to reinvention as a software company or else decline into irrelevance. If you once sold books to customers to help them solve problems like getting a degree, to entertain them or to help them do their job better, you now had better find a way to do it ten times more effectively with software. Otherwise someone else will. The flaccid argument that software companies don't understand content is mere hubris.
Publishers have solved a thousand problems for a thousand kinds of customers by building products on the same powerful device - the book. But that convenient grouping is coming undone as software products of different kinds solve those same problems in powerful new ways. To survive, publishers must identify the customer problem they're uniquely suited to solve and build software to solve it better than anyone else in the world. If they're lucky, publishers' existing skills in content curation, along with their content assets, will serve as accelerators to new product development, rather than become their albatross.
Oops, it's happened again! It turns out some details aren't quite right in "Primates of Park Avenue," a headline-making chronicle of rich New Yorkers' weird habits. So we now have the familiar spectacle of a publisher trying to acknowledge such problems without disowning the work entirely. Is there a way to avoid all this hand-wringing?
Yes there is. Publishing's traditional dividing line - in which books are either fiction or nonfiction - is too strict for modern times. We need a third category, built to accommodate books that nimbly try to straddle both genres. Such books are chock full of genuine facts. But sometimes ordinary facts get rearranged or embellished a bit, especially if there's a so-called larger truth that the author wants to explore.
The truth is, beautiful stories and their associated ethics issues have been with us for a long time. Way back in my teenage years, I read Slavomir Rawicz's 1956 classic, "The Long Walk," about his death-defying journey as part of a group of Soviet-era prisoners who escaped from Siberia and managed to reach India, on foot. This tale of heroism has sold more than 500,000 copies over the years. Rawicz repeatedly insisted it was true. But recent investigators have found serious inconsistencies in his account.
The Authors Guild has outlined some of the "egregious terms" of current contract boilerplates it plans to address in its Fair Contract Initiative, first announced May 28 during BookExpo AmericaBookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States.
Next, the Guild said that the acceptance of a manuscript should not be a "matter of whim," and that a "publishing agreement based on a proposal is not an option, it is a contract to publish and pay, assuming the author delivers." The group also took on payment structure, and argued that advances "must remain advances," urging publishers to move away from payment schedules divided into three or four parts. The Guild said they "defeat the whole purpose of advances: to enable authors to devote themselves to completing their books without having to take on other work to make ends meet."
Amazon has just announced sweeping changes to their Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. Under this new model, the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read rather than their share of total qualified borrows.
The authors that will benefit the most from the KDP Select restructuring are those who publish episodic or serialized fiction. There has been an influx of this type of material on Amazon in the last few years, since the books are easily read, digestible and there is freedom for the author to pivot based on consumer feedback.
15 June 2015
Bestselling novelist Marian Keyes recently called the term "chick lit" derogatory, and now other female writers are expressing how much they dislike the term.
Some believe books by women are often sidelined and not taken as seriously as those by men, even when, as with Keyes' work, they address topics as serious as drug addiction, depression, and domestic violence, and sell in vast quantities.
McFarlane highlighted the way some male-created content is marketed in comparison.
"Look at the respect accorded to foil-title crime novels or brainless action movies as valid entertainment, by comparison," she said.
Lynn Enright, the author of novella 38 Reasons I Want to Marry My Boyfriend, declared: "Men have no problem pressing a book by Philip Roth into your hand, saying 'you absolutely have to read this novel that is basically about a man's relationship with his penis' Women don't behave in the same way," she said: "They just don't have the same confidence to recommend books that deal with gender-specific issues."
On the print side, Amazon continues to be the largest single customer for almost every publisher. And even though they have managed to increase their discounts and various marketing fees and their returns have creeped up, they are still the most profitable large account for many, if not most, publishers. Since Borders went down several years ago, Amazon has, indeed, grown, but independent stores have also thrived and become more numerous. And although Barnes & Noble still slowly shrinks in sales, it remains the most important account for "breaking" many new titles and still provides more sales to most publishers than all the indie bookstores combined.
For those authors who find it hard or impossible to get an agent or a deal, self-publishing is a godsend. It gives them a way to really reach the global public at minimal cost and, as we've seen repeatedly over the past decade, they can, indeed, break through and achieve commercial success. This is only a good thing for everybody. Even publishers benefit because they get to discover new talent that is surfaced by self-publishing. For those authors who are working steadily and profitably for publishers, self-publishing has offered the possibility of greater control and bigger margins: more profit if they can achieve the same level of sale. This is not an opportunity very many authors in this category have pursued. That has surprised me a little bit, but probably it shouldn't have. Being a publisher is a lot of work and no small risk. If an author is making a living doing the writing and letting a publisher handle the rest, that's damn near nirvana. Very few in that position want to abandon it.
So that leaves the authors "in the middle": getting deals or capable of getting deals, but not really making the living they want to make with those deals. Among those authors, if they have the skills to manage an enterprise and the personality to put themselves out there for promotion, self-publishing offers a real alternative to the legacy system. Particularly for those authors who have a backlist they can claw back rights to and use as a foundation for their efforts, this new opportunity has real possibilities.
The UK's parochial reading habits are an embarrassment, according to the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Nick Barley has introduced his sixth and most globally ambitious programme, which includes authors from North and South Korea, as well as first minister Nicola Sturgeon interviewing her favourite Scottish crime writer, Val McDermid.
Describing the festival, which runs from 15 to 31 August in Edinburgh's Charlotte square, as "the most international ever attempted in Britain", Barley accepted that many names would not be familiar to a British audience. "But what I want to get across is that these people are megastars in their own countries," he said.
International highlights include Hyeonseo Lee, a North Korean author who describes her flight from the regime; the Colombian writer and politician, Sergio Fajardo; and three leading poets from the Innu First Nation people of northern Quebec, who will perform in their native language of Inuktitut.
In an attempt to reach beyond the usual publishing networks, Barley visited African novelist Alain Mabanckou in his home country of Congo-Brazzaville, where he witnessed scenes of adulation as the author walked through the streets.It's the responsibility of a festival like ours to make available literature in translation.
The festival, which spans 800 events and features writers from 55 countries, also includes a series from guest selector, Gabriel Orozco, Mexico's most renowned visual artist, who has chosen seven nationally popular authors to interview.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti lives in a modest second-story walk-up in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. Hanging on his walls are his doctorate from the Sorbonne, an unframed Paul Gaugin print and posters of celebrated poetry readings dating back to the days when he personified a hip, literate and rebellious San Francisco. Not that he's nostalgic.
"Everything was better than it is when you're old," he says.
Sixty years ago, Ferlinghetti, now 96, was the principal publisher of an iconoclastic band of writers and poets known as the Beat Generation. Today, he's still co-owner of City LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/, one of the most celebrated independent book stores in America. These are quieter days for the internationally acclaimed poet and painter. His eyes are going, but his mind and humor are sharp. And while he may have slowed down some, he's still publishing three books this year. Ferlinghetti is generous with his time, and he greets this reporter's visit with a surprise. "I see you've got those reporter's notebooks," he says. "I wrote a whole novel here in these reporter's notebooks - 78 of them there." (We'll get to back to his unfinished novel a bit later.)
In the UK, self-published books, both digital and print, accounted for 5% of the total market in 2014, according to Nielsen Book, amounting to some £58 million of book spend and some 17 million units. Self-published titles represented 5% of all books sold - print and digital - and 15% of all ebooks. The sector grew 16% in the first quarter of 2015 and has leapt 77% since 2012. Everyone knows self-publishing is growing, but there is nothing like hard data to bring it home.
With many publishing platforms providing editorial services, advice, suggestions, even criticism - just as a traditional publisher does - at what point does it all just become "publishing?" Perhaps it will happen when a particular independent publisher that has built a certain reputation receives a manuscript and says "we don't think this is quite right; we think it needs work in certain areas," or perhaps just says "no, this isn't right for us." All of a sudden, you would have one of the new breed of independent publishers or platforms acting like a traditional house.
Equally, how long before mainstream publishers begin opening self-publishing wings so that some of that £58 million can flow their way?
As I speak to the illustrator, writer and political cartoonist Chris Riddell - who has just been appointed the ninth Waterstones Children's Laureate - he is drawing, on a press release, a picture of himself drawing on a press release.
"Very meta, isn't it?" he remarks.
He is living up to his own suggestion that everyone "draw every day" - not meant as a finger-wagging injunction, he says. He doesn't want to create another thing for parents to feel guilty about, or detract from time spent sharing books. "It's more: 'have you tried it?'" He thinks drawing together, like reading together, is a bonding experience. "My sketchbook is not sacrosanct and my children" - he has three - "would draw on one page while I drew on the other. It was something we shared."
Riddell, who is 53, has illustrated more than 150 books since his career began in the Eighties. He has won two Kate Greenaway medals for illustrating the words of others - for Pirate Diary by Richard Platt (2002) and Martin Jenkins's rendition of Gulliver (2004) - and he won the Costa Children's Book Award for his own Goth Girl, in which his delight in puns, gothic sensibility and relish for literary allusion reached a peak. His celebrated collaborations include three books with Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book and Fortunately the Milk were both best-sellers) and a fantasy pastiche series with Paul Stewart. He took the dismal text of Russell Brand's retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and made it spectacular. A Great Big Cuddle: Poems for the Very Young, chosen by fellow Laureate Michael Rosen, is out in September.
Once a week, Riddell lampoons fat cats and political leaders with decorative opulence in The Literary Review and The Observer. "The Observer was the paper my father read," he says, before explaining that his entry into the field of political cartoons came from The Economist, though to this day he doesn't know why. "I like to think the editor was reading my picturebooks to his children - The Trouble With Elephants was about that time - and he thought my way with large animals made me just the person to comment on the European Union." Riddell says he is "a man of firm opinions", but does not want to politicise the Laureateship. "I'm there to advocate writers and illustrators and the children's books industry."
Until 1 January this year, a self-published author or small independent publisher had a couple of choices for where to sell their ebooks. The most obvious, and easiest, was through a big platform such as Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google or iTunes. These companies took a sizeable cut of sales, and had terms and conditions that could change at any time, but it was worth it for the exposure.
Authors also had another option: to sell ebooks to readers directly through their own website. This required the wherewithal to format an ebook file and set up a PayPal plug-in, but it meant that authors got all the money from book sales, and were protected from the whims of the big retailers.
All fair and square? Not really. For microbusinesses faced with the job of calculating myriad tax rates, the new regime is an administrative nightmare. Author Cory Doctorow said he was forced to spend £700 on software and accountancy fees. Also, whereas businesses with an annual turnover of less than £81,000 used to be exempt from VAT, now if they sell even one ebook or audiobook to a customer outside the UK they must apply VAT to all UK sales too. For many, the only feasible option is to sell through Amazon or another large retailer.
The European parliament says it is investigating reduced rates for ebooks. In the meantime, a law ostensibly designed to reduce the dominance of big corporations will likely result in their becoming even stronger.